Eric Miquelon is President of Avanade North America.
Have you ever been in the middle of a two-hour phone call with your internet provider when you start to wonder: “Did I just step into an episode of Black Mirror?”
I bet everyone reading this has had the experience of sitting on the line with a call center while an agent reads from a script, then transfers you to another agent who reads from an identical script and on and on.
The core of this particular bad experience is the core of nearly every bad customer experience: a failure to listen. Despite talking to so many people, you don’t feel heard. They’re not listening to you in the moment, and clearly, they weren’t listening to their customers when they designed the experience itself.
Ways To Listen To The Customer
What happens when an organization does listen—I mean, really listens? As the head of an organization that helps others rethink their customer experience strategies, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many companies that are able to differentiate themselves by listening to the customer—and from this create an effective customer strategy. One recent example of a business that’s doing just that works within the financial sector, and I find that their results speak for themselves.
This business happens to be a world-renowned consumer bank. There are a number of reasons why they’re world-renowned, but customer experience is at the top of the list. They’ve earned a reputation for taking the most frustrating aspects of banking—and customer service, in general—and making them fast, intuitive and personal. They turn the worst into the best.
For a simple example, let’s say you lose your debit card. As a customer of this bank, you don’t have to call and explain what happened. You can simply open the bank app, say “I lost my debit card,” and a virtual agent will take care of everything for you, seamlessly freezing your card and monitoring your accounts.
Then, when you find your card in the couch cushions an hour later, your virtual agent can reactivate it. By listening to what customers want, they’ve discovered how to best serve them in cases like this.
The beauty of this experience is that it takes a stressful moment—misplacing your debit card—and transforms it into an opportunity to surprise and delight. You were having a bad day, or at least a bad moment, and suddenly your bank turns it into a good one. That’s powerful and is something that will stick with you.
Make Your Customer Experiences A Valuable Asset
For this bank, their outstanding customer experiences have become their most valuable marketing asset. People around the world recognize its name because of these experiences. Any bank can create a flashy marketing campaign; this one is delivering experiences that make a genuine impact, and people are talking about it.
Don’t get me wrong; marketing is and will continue to be important. But a key takeaway is that if you deliver great experiences, your customers will do a lot of your marketing for you.
I find that at the core of every great experience is a business that dared to listen. Amazing customer experiences are rooted in deep, authentic understanding, and the only way to gain that understanding is to practice humility and empathy. You have to have the humility to acknowledge that your customers really do know what’s best for them—and then the empathy to build experiences based on what truly matters.
In my experience, too many organizations still spend most of their time telling customers what they should want. If you want to break that mold and deliver exceptional experiences, try listening to your customers the way you want businesses—or anyone, really—to listen to you.
That means no reading from a script. No transferring to another department. No putting anyone on hold. If you want to understand what the person on the other end of the line values, you have to do one of the hardest things in the world. Just listen.
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